Clay Richardson's Blog

When you spend time taking a sober look at a market's maturity - like we did with our recently published BPM Tech Radar report - some technologies make you yawn, but then other technologies give you goose bumps. The primary purpose of the BPM Tech Radar was to map the maturity of the 15 most critical technologies that make up the BPM landscape. This included tried and true technologies such as workflow, process modeling, document imaging, and business rules; in addition to bleeding and leading edge technologies such as process data management and process mashups.

Now that I've had time to step back from the excitement of pulling the report together (that's a completely separate blog post or book unto itself), one key point has lodged itself into my subconscious - yes, I've had a few dreams about this (pretty sad, I know): Of all the technologies we evaluated, the components that generated the most buzz and excitement had some connection with social media or Web 2.0. That’s not a big surprise, right? Social media is hot right now, it's sexy, it's the "golden child" so to speak. But BPM and social media together?

At first blush it seems an odd marriage. But take a step back. Okay, a few steps back. Let's remember what BPM is all about: Ultimately, BPM is a discipline for continually improving cross-functional, end-to-end business processes. To accomplish this, Business Process professionals spend gobs of time and money analyzing and implementing strategies to improve process collaboration, communication, interdepartmental hand-offs, and institutional process knowledge. Hmmm... collaboration, communication, updating knowledge - smells pretty social to me. In many ways, social is just the natural extension and evolution of collaboration, as Connie Moore outlined in her recent blog post “Great News For The Process World — A Sea Change Is Coming.”

While the BPM suites market evolved over the past two decades to support the "known human interactions" within the enterprise, vendors continue to overlook - or can't capture - a lot of the process whitespace within organizations. Think: e-mail communication about a process, instant messaging to get a response to a process-related question, allowing business users to generate processes, allowing front-line workers to update process knowledge. Based on our BPM Tech Radar interviews - we spoke with over 65 customers, leading vendors, and BPM evangelists - it seems that social and Web 2.0 technologies are breathing new life into BPMS to tackle the remaining process whitespace that still needs to be conquered in the enterprise.

Early leaders in the “Social BPM” space include Lombardi and Software AG. Earlier this year, Software AG announced their AlignSpace offeringunder the banner of Social BPM. And, Lombardi is also pushing the envelope in this space with their Blueprint platform, which now offers a "friend feed" style feature that allows process users to get feeds on process model and requirements changes throughout discovery. IBM is even getting into the game by integrating some of Lotus’ social components with Websphere Process Server.

So what's driving this trend of Social BPM? Three larger trends are pushing process and social media closer together:

Accelerated pace of change in the business environment - Business leaders who thought they had months or years to adapt their processes to changing conditions are now fossils, driven into extinction by our latest recession. Going forward, business leaders need to approach BPM using both a top-down and bottom-up approach. New technologies, such as "process wikis" allow frontline workers to update process knowledge as conditions change on the ground. This real-time feedback loop was never available before; most updates to process knowledge are only captured haphazardly or driven from the top down.

The need to put process completely into context - I spend a lot of time trying to read through e-mail threads to understand the complete context of a question posed to me (the snowball effect: e-mail starts off from one person, bounces around, and then ends up in my inbox). Completing a process often involves numerous conversations - via e-mail, instant messenger, voicemail, etc. - that fall outside of the BPM suite container. Imagine combining a tool like Google Wave with a BPMS: Now process-related conversations and threads can be easily traced throughout the process instance. So, instead of digging through e-mail, you can click on an activity in the process and see the entire context of conversations around the in-flight process.

Demand for user-generated content - I'm man enough to admit it: Just like you I jumped on the "get-rich building your own iPhone app" bandwagon. Why? Because I think I can code and I want the world to see my new whiz-bang idea for the iPhone. Of course none of this ever materialized (I have a full time job, remember?). But a lot of other hack and weekend developers rolled up their sleeves and contributed their own whiz-bang apps - some good, some not so good. Looks like users and department heads are also trying to get in on the act of user-generated content. Except it's not for the iPhone - it's for internal processes. "Process mashups" (such as Serena Business Mashups) and "BPM-as-a-Service" (such as Appian Anywhere) technologies are indulging the business' fantasy of automating processes without IT's help. And the verdict? Process hacks are having success generating some pretty nice processes (that run!).

Recently, I did a guest spot on CIOTalkRadio covering "human interaction management." Phil Gilbert (Lombardi Software's CEO) and Howard Smith (CTO, CSC European Group) were also guests for the segment. I kind of blew up the show by telling the host, Sanjog Aul, that I hated the term "human interaction management" since it assumes we can manage "human interactions". Really? At any rate Phil and I ended up hijacking the conversation to lay out the future of what work and processes will look like. The short of it, processes and BPM will be much more social. Phil threw out a statement that I think sums it up well: "A lot of people are looking for BPM on steroids. What we really need is BPM on Facebook."

Why It Matters

Don't discount social media's impact on business process management just because of its current level of hype and consumer focus. Over the next two to three years BPM suites will continue to incorporate social technologies and features that connect process to the real way that people work and get things done. Millennials and Gen Y employees entering the work force will likely embrace these new features and help accelerate the Social BPM trend. Business Process professionals should keep an open eye (and open mind) out for opportunities to begin leveraging Social BPM components such as process wikis, process mashups, and BPM-as-a-Service.

What's Your Take?

I want to hear from you. Let me know what you think about social media's impact on the BPM market? Do you think Social BPM represents the natural progression of BPM suites. Do you think social technologies will help BPM suites harness process-related conversations and user generated content? Or do you think this is just a mashup of two hot market segments that really don’t belong togehter?

Comments

Clay,I couldn't agree more, bringing the social aspects of business processes as a complement to standard BPM technology is going to be BIG.I actually think that the steps that will the have the biggest impact early on will be the addition of email and documents as part of the BPM stack - since those are the major social tools that exist to day in most business.Interesting you should mention Google Wave, ActionBase has many of the same attributes but with an enterprise process and Microsoft orientation. I blogged about it here http://blog.actionbase.com/actionbase-wave.

Clay, I don't think that social media and BPM is a strange combination at all: I gave a presentation on that very topic at the BPMG conference over three years ago: http://www.slideshare.net/skemsley/web-20-and-bpmGood to see that the future that I saw at that time, including process wikis for collaborative modeling, is finally coming true!

Sandy, very nice slide deck! I encounter a lot of resistance to the Social BPM trend from CIO's and IT managers that only think of social in terms of "sharing information on the web" (i.e., facebook or twitter). Most are concerned about security or people using social media when they should be working. The picture we're both painting is a different use of social technologies - internally focused (or with trusted partners) , to improve productivity and collaboration within the firewall.Thanks for sharing!

Oddly enough, earlier today SAP demoed a prototype of Netweaver and Google Wave working together. Check it out here: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/15618.Expect to see more examples of Google Wave and other social technologies embedded into BPM Suites over the next 12 - 18 months.

I totally agree with Clay, and have been preaching this message for years, because before social existed there was collaboration and content management that needed to be added to BPM. Now the groundswell is building because social has all the buzz. That's great, if it is an accelerant for adding Design for People to the BPM vision. Two years ago John Rymer and I gave a presentation about dynamic business applications. We said that it wasn't enough to have BPM that is built for continous change (note that build for change is Pegasystems' trademark). In addition to built for continuous change, you must have the design for people element. I think this is the fundamental shift: we are coming up with a new class of applications that encompass those two mantras, and BPM and social are core building blocks. Other building blocks besides social and BPM include SOA, business rules, business event management, content management, collaboration, the information workplace, predictive analytics and information as a service.

Great article Clay. I agree that this is a fundamental shift in the way people perceive of BPM. For years it has been seen as somewhat of a mystical art, and only truly understood by those behind the curtain. Current BPM tools perpetuate this thought. They are really not built for process participants, but rather for process experts who have been trained in how to use them.I believe this shift in thinking is a natural evolution. Like many things we all really knew that BPM was a social problem, but there were just not tools available to support the required interactions. As much as corporations don't like FaceBook and Twitter, they can not argue with their success. There is a reason that both of these apps have take off so fast...they allow people to work in a way that is natural to them. Now with apps like AlignSpace users are able to leverage this familiar interaction pattern for business purposes.I hope that you continue blogging on this topic.

Clay - very good and this lines up with the concept that a "social business" is about solving business processes by leveraging the social context for strong collaboration and effect. Social Business Software is being forced to keep up as business models shift to take advantage of social metaphors, Web 2.0 effects and business integration. Check out this recent slideshare that shows this evolution. http://www.slideshare.net/7Summits/applied-social-media-for-a-social-business